Leo Tolstoy figured large in the deeply partisan and impassioned debates during the Russian revolutionary period (1917–24). In the uncharted social and political chaos of disappearing and emerging institutions, competing centers of authority vied for validation and credibility by reciting and creating stories about Tolstoy: how he foretold the Revolution, warned against it, or caused it; why he would have rejected or embraced it; what he would have said or done had he lived to see it. Regardless of political position, these commentators saw Tolstoy as the code that, when correctly interpreted, offered a truer understanding of the Revolution's cipher, because both Tolstoy and the Revolution were equally products of a uniquely Russian experience.

An examination of the stories people told about Tolstoy in primary historical documents from the Russian and international press provides a fuller and more nuanced historical understanding of debates about the authenticity, inevitability, and justness of the Russian Revolution. While the storytellers intended only to influence the perception of the Revolution by invoking Tolstoy, making what was new and unfamiliar into something comprehensible by referencing something known, these stories nonetheless altered Tolstoy's image as well.